Very nice article.

Excerpt:
“Years ago if you put in long hours and worked hard for a company, you were rewarded with gradual promotions, longer vacations, medical insurance, and a healthy retirement plan. Most people expected to work 20 years or more at one company. Today to get ahead and save for a reasonable retirement, workers often must hop from company to company to get a promotion. Hard work and dedication to a job well done are no longer seen as ways to protect a job. Everyone is expendable, thanks to many employers’ short-term, economic goals. And there’s no incentive to work long hours. It won’t likely pay off for the worker in the long run.”

Really, really great article. Everyone should read it.

Assuming you work, how, exactly, do you see your job?

I believe it should be a trade. A trade is something done by mutual consent – both sides should believe that they’re “coming on top” (note: not necessarily deceiving the other side!), that what they’re getting is worth more to them than what they’re giving. For instance, the worker may think something like “I like doing this, so if I’m paid to do it, so much the better”, while the employer thinks “what I pay him is nothing compared to the money his work makes me.”

To me, that’s how a job should be. If both sides are happy, fine. If one isn’t, the trade should be terminated. (I know socialists and other collectivists will hate me for that, because they believe a worker should be able to hang on to the job when the employer doesn’t want him any more, because he “needs” the job…)

If an employer doesn’t want or need a worker anymore, he should fire him (with appropriate compensation, unless there was “just cause”, like him not doing his part of the contract, namely, working). If a worker doesn’t like the working conditions, or the relationship between work and pay, he should leave (after finding a new job, of course). To me, this is obvious.

To most people, that is inconceivable.

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This article is a bit too technical for this blog, so I won’t post it here, but it’s related to the previous “keeping busy” ones. If you’re curious, feel free to read it.

(NOTE: reading part 1 first may be a good idea. )

To explore the “acting busy” vs. “doing actual work” theme, I want to share (without the sordid details, of course) a situation I’ve been in.

A few years ago, I worked as a sysadmin in a company which had about 20-30 Linux servers, and about the same number of Windows (NT 4 and 2000, at the time) servers. There were two separate teams of sysadmins, one for each type of servers, though both teams had the same boss, and worked in the same room.

The two teams, however, had a very different philosophy of work…

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(NOTE: I wrote this one for The Tlog, but I think it also fits in WotM.)

I don’t know if I’ve been unlucky in most of the jobs I had, or if it’s like this everywhere, but, if you work in IT, does it look to you as if your boss doesn’t really care about your achieving objectives, being productive, having everything working smoothly, tasks being done quickly and efficiently, etc. – he only cares about whether you’re busy all the time or not?

Or, to put it in another way: were you hired, and are you being paid to do your job, perform your assigned tasks efficiently, keep everything running smoothly, anticipate problems and make sure they don’t happen, optimize what can be optimized, solve problems as they appear, help users with problems, and so on… or were you hired to be busy 7-8 hours a day?

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